Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Silent Sam and other stories.djvu/375

363 forgot his father. He leaned out over the edge of the gallery, tingling with an indescribable sensation of joyful apprehension that moved in his lower insides. The captain was picking locks. He had found the miser's strong box. He was forcing it. He was emptying it on the table—with a noisy jingling of stage money. He was looking for the secret will. When he held up a yellowed paper hanging from a huge red seal, Mickey recognized it; he had seen stage wills before. He breathed as if on tiptoe; and his father's restraining hand, on his coat tail, hushed the very beating of his heart.

It was then that the robber awoke to the danger of his situation. The door! The door behind him! It was opening! He was discovered. "Help! Help!" He threw himself on the miser. The old man struggled and choked. And Mickey strangled the gallery railing with a relentless clutch. A gurgle, a sob— What? He had killed him! He 'd be caught! "Ssss-sh!"

Some one—some one—was coming. It was the robber's blind wife. "Thank God, she 's blind!" Mickey caught a long breath, and the robber escaped noiselessly through the open door, just as the blind woman stumbled on the body of the dead miser and screamed an alarm. The innocent sailor rushed in to her cry. He was seized by the police (who had apparently been in the next room). "Arrest that man for murder!" "I am in-no-cent!" Then the robber captain's deep bass boomed out from the background: "And my evidence will prrrove it!"